tv Reviews Only

The really ingenious element of "The Search" is the way that, for even the space of a single episode, we don't just imagine The Office without Carell, we kind of look forward to it. - Slant MagazineEDIT

Written with sterling wit and a flair for declaratives, it's easy to imagine that Downton Abbey is some sort of sly critique of aristocracy, satire of the new gilded age, or brave examination of conscience and class. - Slant MagazineEDIT

As its seasons have worn on and its universe of beasties and beastly acts has expanded, True Blood has become less interested in revising or adapting the soap-operatic tropes that made it such campy fun to begin with. - Slant MagazineEDIT

The Killing's allusiveness, its play with cliche, and employment of television archetypes work to set up a series of false solutions, bad leads, and conventional speculations that it then systematically overturns. - Slant MagazineEDIT

Written with sterling wit and a flair for declaratives, it's easy to imagine that Downton Abbey is some sort of sly critique of aristocracy, satire of the new gilded age, or brave examination of conscience and class. - Slant MagazineEDIT

If you agree with the show's politics, then The New Normal will blithely reaffirm your assumptions without challenging or engaging them. If you disagree, don't worry. That's normal. - Slant MagazineEDIT

Smash is a great idea for a show, but NBC has focused so much attention on its presentation - the musical numbers, the production design - that it has yet to access the depth of the story it is telling. - Slant MagazineEDIT

Enlightened is a bipolar series - oscillating actively between comedy and drama, tranquility and anger, humanism and satire - held together, for every frame of every episode, by the virtuosic rampaging of its star. - Slant MagazineEDIT

If Game of Thrones can find its place in the personal (in the power, corruption, and integrity to be found in individual souls), then it can transcend the ugly social and historical dynamics that it so casually relies on and reproduces. - Slant MagazineEDIT

Mistaking vulgarity for comic edge and very thinly stretched punnery for wit, Veep is less a trenchant satire about contemporary politics than it is a relentlessly mean-spirited spectacle about crummy people. - Slant MagazineEDIT